The Employers’ Resource Pack will offer guidance and learning to cover a range of practical information aimed at the personnel officers, managers and proprietors on the concept and  practice of skills swapping - what it is, what makes it different and how it can work. It will be produced in the form of an imaginatively designed handbook that will enable sector employers to identify and define their own aims and objectives for a skills swap programme. It will contain supporting resources, exercises and challenges that are focused on how to set up skills swaps that encourage apprentices to see the prospects for long term careers in the hospitality sector and for established employees to see the benefits of learning something new. The approach taken to design and structure will address the need that hospitality managers, especially those who are owner managers that are running smallerenterprises, cannot attend traditionally-organised seminars - less still fixed training courses. Therefore, written as a self-directed learning guide, it will concentrate on being accessible and easy to use, avoiding managers or their leading staff having to leave their establishment to come into set training. Its envisaged impact is even more an imperative as, aside from the underlying issues in the sector concerning skills shortages, the hospitality sector finds itself recovering later in 2020 and through 2021 after the decimation caused by Covid-19.

Employers in skills swaps are both ‘hosts’ and ‘senders’. Therefore, this Pack will incorporate illustrations from and topics in different fields of hospitality in terms of the skills swap  concept and the different ways it can be applied. It will also contain and practical and visual examples of good practice in a 'how to do it' and a variety of case studies. The list below provides an indicative set of themes against which the resource pack would provide materials to support the employers and their staff, although this is subject to revision after the completion of IO1 and IO2:
i.Setting up - setting learning aims and objectives for the swap
ii.providing a high-quality experience
iii.logistics, risk assessments
iv.how to cluster-up together as small businesses
v.collaborating - and not competing!
vi.swapping and sharing skills through 'challenges' - team-based project tasks
vii.buddying and mentoring for employees
viii.shadowing activities
ix.closing the swap, evaluation and review
x.keeping in touch